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This piece is the first in a series on targeted health care marketing. In the coming weeks, we’ll bring you a few stories from people in the trenches throughout the industry.
Health data and race are sensitive topics on their own. Put them together, and it’s easy to see why people struggle to thoughtfully tailor their marketing efforts to different audiences.
Still, many health care marketers are opting in to race-based targeting to stay relevant and reach underserved populations.
Effectively speaking to consumers of different backgrounds and connecting them to the care they need necessitates an in-depth knowledge of who they are.
“You have to proceed with a degree of specificity about who you’re trying to speak to at all times,” said Albert Thompson, managing director of digital at full-service advertising agency Walter Isaacson. “Nowhere is the need for segmentation more paramount than in health care because the stakes are so high.”
When developing ad creative and a media plan for an ad campaign, there is some consensus that health care marketers should consider a wide range of traits. Based on conversations with several industry experts, to target different audience segments, advertisers should look beyond consumers’ medical-condition prevalence to characteristics such as language and communication-style preferences, experiences, values, traditions and expectations surrounding health care.
Arguably, getting suitable health care products in front of the right audiences can be a matter of life and death.
“Health care companies sit on a trove of data, so they should be wired to excel,” Thompson said. But “there’s underachievement in the overall practice of speaking to different segments [of the population] in a vertical that is probably the most critical for longevity and survival.”
Legally speaking
Of course, speaking to specific segments of the population about health care can be challenging….
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